fc2

Furkid Chronicles 2

Murphy

With the exception of the occasional fight, Murphy's movements are best described as, "sloth-like". This has served him well in the past, but may one day lead to his downfall.

I remember one summer day when he entered the yard of a very hyper Border Collie who was known to be a cat-hater. He lumbered into the garden in seeming slow motion, (his usual speed) and sat in the middle of the lawn. I saw what was happening, and in my haste to reach the yard, my motion wakened the dog who spotted Murphy immediately and launched herself like a Banshee at the Buddha-like cat.

Murphy merely sat staring benignly at the sky, perhaps calculating the angle of the sun or the relative humidity or imagining pictures in the clouds passing above.

The dog, used to taking up the chase at this point, noticed that the cat had not moved and seemed not to be intimidated by the baying and the velocity at which he was being approached. She attempted to slam on her brakes and ended up overshooting her intended target. Wheeling herself about angrily, she proceeded to race in circles around the cat, her barks becoming more and more shrill with each revolution.

Murphy continued his meditation. Not an ear twitched, not an eye blinked. His brain cells focused on some single thought of some wonderment in the sky above. Gandhi would have been proud.

The dog?
She eventually stopped. Exhausted, perplexed and somewhat humiliated she wandered off to lie down, and I at last reached Murphy and carried him unceremoniously home.

You must understand. It isn't that Murphy is a complete idiot. It is just that he has what I refer to as a "lag time" problem. By this I mean the length of time it takes for the stimulus (e.g. sound, movement or image) to travel to the brain, gain entry, locate the processing room to be recognized and assessed before a decision is made as to whether or not some sort of action is necessary; decide what course of action might be called for, locate the area of the brain responsible for signalling the carrying out of such actions, relay the order and put into motion the carrying out of the afforementioned action. With Murphy, this process can take from 3 seconds to 30seconds... to 30 minutes ...or an hour or...well, you get the idea.

Do let me tell you about Murphy and the cobwebs.
I live in a mobile home. One summer day I decided to retrieve some lumber I had stored under the large addition on the east side. Murphy loves to explore, and I had no sooner removed the skirting panel than the cat was in there and unwilling to come out until every corner had been explored and every mouse vanquished. There was nothing for me to do but leave the skirting off and wait for him to emerge. I left him to it and went into the house to do laundry.

About an hour later I was passing the back door when I happened to glance out and see Murphy slowly making his way up the back steps. Something seemed amiss. He was wearing something over his head that hung down to the ground as he walked. It was a mass of cobwebs. I ran to the front of the mobile and grabbed my camera, exited out the front door, quietly passed through the garden gate and crept around to the back steps. There he was, sitting on the back porch, seemingly unaware that anything might be wrong.

Quickly I snapped a couple of pictures. I knew I should remove the thing from his head, but I was loathe to touch it, filled as it was with dead and live insects among other things like some dreadful unholy cowl. I headed back through the yard to the front door, deposited the camera inside and searched frantically for something to aid me. The only thing that came to mind and to hand was the dog's old comb, so clutching that, I once again headed out the front, knowing that had I opened the back door Murphy would have rushed into the house with his new attire.

Just as I was rounding the corner, approaching the cat, he finally realized that there must be some logical reason for his poor vision, and reached tentatively up with a paw to investigate.

No, Murphy is not stupid.
I prefer to think of him as profoundly philosophical, spending his days deep in thought. Is he theorizing some solution to the problem of the shifting of the Tectonic Plates? Perhaps he is admiring the works of the great poets. He may even be inventing the perfect cat food flavor. Who knows what wondrous thoughts drift through his mind each day as the mundane world passes by him unnoticed.